Are You Afraid Of The Dark?
We all like to know what we are doing and where we are heading. We like to be able to see and hold in our hands the things that we desire.
Yet the art of creating is a lot about having faith in the unseen. Trusting in something, an energy, a force that is not a form that our eyes can see or our ears can hear audibly. Creating art, creating anything has an intuitive element. One where we know something to do and we have an idea we want fulfilled but we don’t know it through our five senses. We sense it in an altogether different way.
Even as I write this, I am finding it hard to put into words because it does not seem to originate from the same place as my everyday activities; my conscious acts. The marked difference is that when I am making art, I utilise a whole other channel. I definitely feel like I am a conduit for this creative energy because as soon as the idea appears and I am in working with it, to bring it to life, I sense I am not working in my usual mode or practice.
I am not tapping into what I already know, what I already think, what has already been seen and understood. I am moving from a more silent space that is showing me the path one step at a time, one brush stroke at a time and I am in harmony with this flow, all the while trusting in something unseen. I don’t already know the outcome, I can’t see how it is all going to work out, or come about. All I know is this magnetic energy is coming through and I seem to know how to converse with it creatively. A language I do not remember learning or being taught and yet it seems as natural as taking a breath; always been there and never leaves.
Yet, I step out of it and lean back into what I know, what is familiar and the habitual noises and thought forms, regain their shape and enter the world of what I know. I easily navigate myself back into that world and no visible bridge has been crossed but I can tell the difference. I know when I am creating from the unseen and intuit the trust that I have when I do not know what is coming next. I have a faith in that creative energy that I am sorry to say I do not have in my conscious acts. In my everyday habits, thoughts and actions, I am perpetually looking for confirmation that I am doing the right thing, on the right path. There is not so much a faith in the unknown as there is a dogged determination to want to know what every outcome is going to be. A faithless conviction in the acts of me, dependent on me and heavily laden with expectation.
And then the creation of art commences and all the standard ways of living, fall away in silence, no fanfare, no announcement but they are gone and in their place is the creative void from which anything can and does appear and I see it evolve as I create. I am as engaged in curiosity as anyone else would be watching, wondering what the next stroke will form. I inhabit a different space with no door to enter or exit. A portal that seemingly appears and disappears. I wonder if there is a way to stay in that space a little longer, like when you are having a lucid dream and want to elongate it.
All I know from my own experience is I make art from a different place to the one I inhabit and live from on a daily basis in my other activities. It is a place that I know exists that I can’t name or locate. It is a space that I have an unwavering faith in and know that it has never left and never returned, it just is. It is this trust that I have in harmony with it that lets me know I can never run out of creative ideas, that this energy is infinite and does not come with a sell by date on it. It is not of this world and it is not of the making of the rules and limits that we all live by whether consciously or unconsciously.
It has shown me how being a creative is having faith in the unseen. We trust our ideas and our imaginations and we create from a place that we can see and intuit and we bring a creation into the world. We are taught to be afraid of the dark. To not trust what we can’t see or don’t understand. But what if the opposite is true? What if the darkness holds infinite possibilities of creation and is not to be feared or turned away from, but rather to be embraced. To walk into that dark void with faith to see what gets created.
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